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Let's Rank Law Schools

There were two different law school rankings recently released that rank law schools by the number of graduates securing full-time employment requiring a JD.

The first list ranks law schools but excludes those positions that are funded by the law schools. When the call first came for more transparent employment statistics, a big critique was that law schools would game the system by employing graduates in JD-required jobs for short spurts of time to help the school's employment stats. The author of this list also notes that school-funded jobs are generally not the types of positions that will launch a career.

The second list ranks law schools and does not exclude the positions that are funded by law schools.

This is just another set of rankings in a long list. The authors of these rankings may think that prospective law students would find these rankings particularly helpful because it is reasonable to think that law school graduates would want to find a job that requires the degree that they worked so hard to get.

However, a recent report out of the ABA Journal shows that many prospective law students plan to pursue alternative careers after they obtain their JDs. "Half of more than 200 prelaw students responding to a survey by Kaplan Test Prep said they plan to use their law degree in a non-traditional legal field, according to a press release. Forty-three percent said they plan to use their law degree to pursue a job in the business world."

Personally, I would be excluded from the first list because I am employed full-time by my alma mater as a law librarian. Maybe I am a bit of an outlier in this type of ranking, but I would say that a full-time, JD required, law librarian position is exactly the type of position that would start a career. Then again, my fellow law students used to look at me quizzically when I would state that I planned to pursue an alternative career as a law librarian.

But it looks like I may have fit in with the current crop of prospective law students. While 200 students is not necessarily representative of the whole, it is interesting that more prelaw students are willing to outright admit that they want to pursue a non-traditional legal field.

The current version of Standard 601(3)(a) was developed during the Comprehensive Review as a method of involving a law library in the process of strategic planning required of a law school. It was envisioned that the planning and assessment taking place for a law school (under what was then Standard 203) would incorporate the work done by the library under this new Standard. To ensure that incorporation, it was decided that a written assessment should be completed by the library. However, when the requirement for strategic planning for a law school was removed during a later phase of the Comprehensive Review, no change was made to the new Standard 601. As a result, the library community has been left…

Law libraries are in the information business. To act as superior guides to this information, we must also be in the people business. We must be concerned with the people who seek our information. And we must be concerned with the people who guide those seekers to the information (i.e., our staff).

Contrary to popular belief, it's not easy to be a staff person in the rigid hierarchy of an academic law library. Particularly at a time when law libraries are facing increased budget pressures that require staff to do much more with much less. This is especially challenging with longtime staff who have seen their jobs change dramatically since they were hired. Many of these folks were not formally trained in librarianship, and they may be resistant to the flexibility needed in today's law library.

Given these challenges, how do we motivate our staff to be the very best guides to our information?

To that end, there was an enlightening program at the AALL Annual Conference in 2013 t…

As we further consider how to train future lawyers for the Algorithmic Society and develop the quality of thinking, listening, relating, collaborating, and learning that will define smartness in this new age, law schools must reach beyond their storied walls.

In law, we must got beyond talking about algorithmic implications to actually help shape algorithmic performance. We need lawyers and programmers to work together to create a sound "machine learning corpus." There's potential for an entirely new subfield to emerge if given the right support. With many law school attached to major research universities, it's a great place to start this cross-pollination and interdisciplinary work.

This type of interdisciplinary work would help to satisfy the career aspirations of advanced-degree seekers but also the wishes of many college presidents, deans, and faculty members who see an interdisciplinary professional education as a path to greater relevance, higher enrollments,…